by Ross Kemp
For eleven days following the raid, the British authorities, including the Prime Minister, waited anxiously for news of the outcome. Haugland and Skinnarland had been unable to find a message left for them by the sabotage team at one of the huts they had been using. It was only when Haukelid and Kjelstrup arrived that they learnt the good news. Shortly before midnight on 10 March, the wires back in the UK came to life and the coded message began to arrive. Deciphered, it read: ‘Operation carried out with 100 per cent success. High Concentration plant completely destroyed. Shots not exchanged since the Germans did not realise anything. The Germans do not appear to know whence they came or whither the party disappeared.’ SWALLOW’s momentous message was greeted with relief and delight in Downing Street, Whitehall and the SOE HQ in Baker Street. Hitler’s hopes of beating the Allies to an atomic bomb had suffered a major setback – but, as events were soon to show, Operation GUNNERSIDE had not killed off his hopes once and for all.
Such was the urgency attached to capturing the Vemork saboteurs that General von Falkenhorst and the dreaded Terboven, the two most senior Germans in Norway, personally supervised the search over the weeks that followed. The senior officer at the Vemork plant was dispatched to the Eastern Front as punishment. At the height of the searches, over 2,000 German troops were deployed, as well as several hundred Norwegian Nazis from Quisling’s NS party.
When the sabotage party had set out to Vemork, Haugland and Skinnarland packed up their W/T apparatus and set up camp high in the mountains above Lake Møsvatn where they knew the Germans never ventured. From the safety of their snowhole, through the binoculars they watched the German troops combing the valley. A state of martial law was declared in the Telemark region with no one allowed to leave without official permission. The Norwegians, however, laughed at the incompetence of the Germans’ hunt for the perpetrators. Looking for suspicious ski tracks was an obvious place to start, but with so many soldiers involved they ended up creating an enormous confusion of tracks that killed off any leads.
Eager to avoid the more populated areas of eastern Norway, Rønneberg had decided to take the long route to Sweden, heading north at the outset before turning back to the southeast. SOE had made up three sets of escape maps, each of which contained twenty-six smaller, more detailed ones of the areas they would pass through. The weather and skiing conditions had been first rate when they had set out, but it wasn’t long before they hit trouble. Their rucksacks were heavy with equipment and poorly designed: the straps bit hard into their shoulders and put extra strain on their backs. They also had to heave a heavily loaded sledge, which was a gruelling effort through the wet snow and over rocky scrubland. Even Rønneberg, not a man to complain easily, recorded in his notes for the operational report that their escape was ‘an awful labour’.
Making sure they weren’t spotted added to the effort, forcing them to take detours around open spaces, main roads, towns and villages. Before each short stretch of the journey, two of them went ahead to reconnoitre the area before the others followed. The landscape, often shrouded in fog or snow, was a bewildering confusion of hills, valleys, forests and lakes, criss-crossed with tracks and paths. Unable to establish their location from the maps, they often had to rely on the compass to guide them. On several nights they were forced to sleep in their sleeping bags in the open, wet through with freezing sweat and melted snow.
On the fifth day, their spirits now at a very low ebb, the temperature plunged again but, in a rare stroke of good fortune, they came across an unoccupied farmhouse where they helped themselves to the stores of flour and bannock bread (hard, unleavened biscuit-style bread). In the remote regions of Norway, where many people kept huts or second homes, it is a custom to let strangers use them on the understanding that they replace, or leave some payment in kind for any provisions they use. Needless to say, the saboteurs weren’t in a position to repay the generosity.
On the evening of the sixth day, they crawled on all fours over a lake that was starting to thaw in darkness, climbed almost 1,000 metres of steep hill before breaking into a hut. The following day, the temperature rose sharply, which was a mixed blessing because it made the snow wet. By the afternoon, it was raining, and progress became even slower and exhausting; by nightfall, the sodden conditions forced the exhausted party to stop. Over the days that followed the party made good progress, but there were fresh problems: as winter continued its jostle with spring, the temperature dropped again, and their supplies were rapidly running out.
Unable to find a hut to break into, for two nights they were forced to sleep in the snow in their sleeping bags. With their rations almost exhausted, they had to veer from the route to seek out provisions, raiding huts for flour and bannock bread. The nearer they got to the Swedish border, the more alert they had to be, as there was a greater concentration of German and Norwegian Nazi units there. Navigating was more straightforward when they were high up because they could see the land and consult their maps, but down in the valleys it was far harder to work out where they were. The raiders were tantalisingly close to freedom when they got lost in the mesmerisingly uniform landscape.
They were heading for the Glåma, the longest river in the country, which runs roughly parallel with the border. When they found it, they were dismayed to discover it was entirely free of ice. They were forced to steal a boat to cross it. The following two nights were spent out in the open again in wet clothes and sleeping bags. No one slept. They were too cold and too hungry. The final leg was especially hard-going. ‘It was dreadful broken and stony country, through scrub and thick woods, with no visibility,’ Rønneberg noted.
Finally, just after eight in the evening on 18 March, 400 km and two weeks after they had set out, bedraggled, worn out and famished, the five men crossed into neutral Sweden. They shook hands, slapped each other on the back and, best of all, lit their first fire in the outdoors since leaving Britain. The following morning, after burying all their incriminating equipment, they changed into civilian clothes and walked along a main road until they were picked up by a police patrol and taken to the local sheriff and then to hospital where they washed and had their clothes disinfected and dried. The following day, the Swedish police happily accepted their cover story that they had escaped from a German work camp. Issued with the relevant identification papers, they continued to Stockholm and reported to the British legation, who arranged for their return to the United Kingdom.
SOE were quick to understand the trials the men had overcome during their arduous escape. ‘The difficulties of this march in winter conditions with the added strain of short rations and hard lying make it a most noteworthy achievement,’ an SOE memo states. Back in Britain at the end of March, Rønneberg noted movingly about his adopted country: ‘On our arrival we were handed a cup of tea. It was a strange feeling because here I was back in Britain, but I felt like I was at home. We often used to refer to it as home when we were in Norway and when I look back on the war I will never forget the welcome that the British showed us.’
Rønneberg, meanwhile, had compiled a comprehensive report of the raid (which can be read in the National Archives at Kew), attached to which is a handwritten message from a senior government figure (only a very few knew of the heavy water threat). It reads: ‘A magnificent report of a great effort. Well planned and beautifully executed. If you return the report to me I will have a condensed edition made for the P.M.’
The destruction of the heavy water and the safe return to the UK of the men who carried it out was by no means the end of the story. There was a great deal of drama to be played out yet. In early April, SWALLOW reported to England that Helberg had been shot trying to escape the Germans. Tributes were duly paid by SOE and his Norwegian comrades. This was wrong. Helberg was very much alive and enjoying a remarkable adventure. The story of his escape, which he wrote up on his return to the UK, amazed even his SOE commanders, who witnessed plenty of high adventure in their roles. His boss Colonel Wilson scrawled a note on Helberg’s
report: ‘The attached is an epic of cool headedness, bravery and resource.’
After the raid, Helberg and Poulsson both headed east for Oslo and met, as arranged, in a café the following week. Poulsson left for Sweden a few days later in order to return to Britain. Helberg’s long-term plan was to make contact with the resistance movement Milorg back in Telemark after lying low for a few weeks while the Germans hunted for the raiders. In the short term, his main priority was to move to a safer place the cache of incriminating equipment that GUNNERSIDE had left near the Jansbu hut where they had sought refuge from the snowstorm after their parachute drop. Were the Germans to find it, there was a strong risk of reprisals against the locals, dozens of whom had already been arrested and taken in for interrogation. After a couple of weeks in Oslo, Milorg said it was safe for him to return to the Hardanger. He left Oslo on 22 March, unaware that the Telemark region was in fact still crawling with Germans.
Helberg spent his first night back on the Hardanger in a hut that was burnt to the ground the following day. The Germans – furious at being unable to track down the ‘British’ saboteurs – were venting their fury on the locals. Still oblivious to the large concentration of German troops in the area, Helberg skied off to the Jansbu hut. Pushing open the door, he found the entire contents of the hut strewn all over the floor. He immediately turned round and saw three German soldiers skiing towards him at speed. Quickly strapping his skis back on, Helberg took his Colt .32 from his rucksack and put it in his pocket. As he pushed off, the Germans opened fire on him, the bullets kicking up puffs of snow around him. ‘I increased my pace so they had to stop shooting and then a first-class long-distance ski race began,’ recalled Helberg in his official report. ‘I had a half year’s training to my credit and was in splendid form.’
Two of the Germans turned back after an hour or so but the third, a very strong and accomplished skier, kept up the chase. Helberg was a strong uphill skier so he headed for the mountains in the hope of shaking him off. He also skied straight into the low, brilliant bright sun in order to dazzle the German if he attempted a potshot. Helberg was weighed down by a heavy rucksack and his skis were in a poor state because he had not had a chance to wax them. Slowly the German gained on him. After about two hours Helberg reached the lip of a steep hill and, fearing his pursuer would catch him on the descent, he decided to stop and settle the matter in a shootout. The German pointed his Luger at him and bellowed ‘Hande hoche!’ (‘Hands up!), but was taken aback when Helberg pulled out his Colt .32. Helberg stood stock still and let the German empty the whole magazine of his pistol. He knew the Luger was not effective beyond a range of about fifty yards and the German was further away than that. When he had fired his last bullet, the hunter became the hunted. Helberg quickly closed on him, took aim and fired. The German slumped to the ground.
Darkness was fast enveloping the Hardanger as Helberg headed back down to the floor of the valley. Halfway down, he felt the earth disappear from under him – he was falling over a very high precipice, as high as forty metres, Helberg estimated. His landing was cushioned by deep snow but he knew instantly that he had broken his left shoulder. To his relief, his skis remained intact and he pressed on, in excruciating pain and exhausted after a day and a half on his skis. Heading towards a town called Rauland where there was a house he knew, he was stopped by a German patrol. Unruffled as ever, Helberg calmly produced his identity card and told the Germans that he had been helping in the search for the British saboteurs. When he arrived at the house, he was disappointed to find it occupied by a group of German soldiers, but once again he passed himself off as a pro-German and settled down for a night of cards and drinking games. So well did he get along with the men who had been tasked with hunting him down, that one even bandaged up his arm in a sling and arranged for him to see a German doctor.
The following day a German Red Cross car was laid on to transport the smiling British-trained Commando to the town of Dalen. There he was to spend the night in a hotel before continuing to Oslo by boat and train for hospital treatment. It was typical of Helberg’s run of luck that Terboven, the country’s ruthless Reichskommissar, arrived at the hotel that night to use it as a base from which he could conduct the searches. Terboven moved into the room next door and SS guards were posted along the corridor. Helberg was caught in the centre of the spider’s web.
Early the next morning, hours before sunrise, a Gestapo officer ordered Helberg to join the other Norwegian guests in the lobby where they were made to wait for six hours. This was a nerve-racking time for Helberg. Not only was he the only single person among the guests, he also had a suspiciously sunburnt, weather-beaten face that could only have been acquired from spending a very long period out in the open. Finally, an officer arrived to explain why they had been rounded up. At dinner the previous evening, an attractive young girl had spurned Terboven’s public overtures and insulted him. Enraged by this display of Norwegian defiance, the Reichskommissar had ordered that all the guests were to be sent to the notorious concentration camp at Grini. Women over fifty and very elderly men were allowed to stay, but the seventeen others were shepherded onto a bus and told that they would be shot on the spot if they attempted to escape. An SS guard sat at the front of the bus by the only door and three more SS men were on motorbikes with sidecars in the escort.
Sitting next to the pretty girl whose boldness had so enraged Terboven, Helberg deliberately struck up a loud, boisterous conversation with her in order to draw the attentions of the SS guard. Sure enough, the German, like a bee to a honeypot, made his way to the back of the bus and indicated that he and Helberg were to swap seats. As the bus slowly negotiated the winding, climbing road, Helberg saw his chance, pulled open the door and leapt out. He hit the frozen ground hard, aggravating his shoulder and smacking his head. He ran into the woods, chased by the shouting Germans. Reaching a high fence that he could not scale, a stick grenade exploded a few yards away, hurling him to the ground. He hauled himself up, sprinted back past the bus and into the dense woods on the other side. A grenade exploded behind him and another hit him in the back, but it didn’t go off until he had scampered clear of its blast range. The Germans fired intermittently into the dark, but after a few minutes they returned to their vehicles and continued their journey. It was these shots that led to the report given to SWALLOW by the Resistance that Helberg had been killed as he tried to escape. To avoid punishment for allowing him to get away, the German guards probably reported that they had killed him.
That night Helberg sought sanctuary in a lunatic asylum in a town called Lier where he had heard that the staff were Jøssings. It was past midnight when he arrived, exhausted, soaked to the skin from the cold rain, and his shoulder and head throbbing with pain. He was immediately taken in, fed, washed, clothed and treated by a doctor. In the morning he was taken five miles down the valley to a hospital in the larger town of Drammen, where he was treated for eighteen days before being released. At the end of May, after three months as a fugitive in his country, Helberg escaped into Sweden and boarded a plane for Britain.
Estimates that it would take a year before the Vemork heavy water plant would return to its preraid operational levels proved wide of the mark. The Germans went to great lengths to repair the damage quickly, replace the destroyed apparatus and resume full-scale production. In July, Skinnarland cabled London with the depressing news that production would be back to full capacity within a month. Once again, the top brass in Whitehall convened to consider their options. Nothing was ruled out.
A ‘coup de main’ attack, similar to the GUNNERSIDE raid, was out of the question. Germans had made major improvements to their defences at Vemork, surrounding the plant with rows of thick barbed-wire barriers and minefields. All doors bar the main entrance to the building were bricked up and the windows had wire meshes fitted to stop bombs being thrown or fired through them. More troops had been drafted in to beef up the garrisons.
The only plausible option was a satu
ration bombing raid. The major drawback of such a plan of action was that innocent Norwegians were likely to die and the entire plant, upon which the local economy depended, would probably be razed to the ground. (Fertilisers for agriculture made up roughly 95 per cent of Vemork’s production.) ‘Precision’ bombing was little more than an expression in World War Two. The reality was that bombers dropped their payloads over the area of the target from a great height and hoped enough of them scored a direct hit. With the heavy water stored in the basement of a solidly built concrete and stone structure, hundreds of heavy, high-explosive bombs would have to be used.
The Norwegian authorities in London were sure to protest vehemently and an SOE memorandum of 20 August 1943 suggested that their High Command and government-in-exile should be kept in the dark about the plans. For the Allied authorities the deaths of innocent civilians and damage to a small local economy was a price worth paying to halt a programme that might wreak far greater destruction in times to come.
One man who didn’t indulge in too much soul-searching over the air raid was Major Leslie Groves, the head of the US atomic bomb project known as ‘Manhattan’. He insisted that the destruction of the Vemork plant was an urgent priority for the Allies and it was partly down to his powers of persuasion that the US government overcame its misgivings and rubber-stamped the plan. The job of carrying out the raid was handed to the US 8th Air Force. The first the Norwegian authorities in London were to hear of the attack was after it had taken place.